Greenhouse Gas Reduction: A Useful Indicator but a Problematic Goal

Cattle in green field with mountains in background

We have so many reasons to embrace GHG accounting as the pathway to drive climate-protecting activities. The GHG Protocol provides a remarkable framework that allows companies to not only look at their direct emissions but also emissions along entire supply chains. GHGs are also elegantly universal, allowing us to quantify the climate impact of a factory in China vs. an airplane flight in the United States. What could be better for the climate movement than to develop rigorous GHG reduction goals and then hold countries and corporations accountable to those goals?

The challenge is that humans are remarkably innovative in finding ways to achieve goals without necessarily adhering to the spirit of the goal. Here are a few examples:

  • What happens when teachers’ salaries are correlated to the students’ performance on a standardized test? Teachers sometimes start teaching for the test at the expense of broader learning.
  • What happens when call centers reward employees for quicker phone calls? Customers are more likely to get hung up on before an issue is resolved. 
  • What happens when police departments are evaluated on crime rate reductions? Some precincts respond by downgrading felonies to misdemeanors, or by discouraging victims from filing reports, effectively improving the metric without actually improving public safety.

All of these metrics – standardized test scores, customer service time, and crime rates – can serve as important indicators of progress, but they can also lead to strategies to improve the metric without achieving the actual goal of providing students with a strong teaching experience, or customers with satisfactory service, or community members with safer streets.

Social scientist Donald T. Campbell summed it up with Campbell’s Law –

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/014971897990048X?via%3Dihub) 

There’s a well-known, and likely mythical, story of early 1900s British colonialists in India desiring to rid the region of cobras. The colonialists offered a reward for every dead cobra brought to them. In the short term, the program provided a powerful incentive for finding and killing cobras. Yet in the longer term, the program provided an incentive to increase the cobra population by farming cobras and then turning in the dead, farmed cobras for even more reward. When the British found out about farmed cobras they ended the program. The cobra farmers no longer had a reason to keep the cobras and thus released them, causing the cobra population to be even larger than when the program started.

This story can be summed up by what is known as Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. 

It is our contention that GHG flux is an excellent measure, but we should have abundant caution about treating it as a target. Continuing to develop and strengthen Measurement, Monitoring and Verification (MMV) protocols for GHGs will help, but it will never close all loopholes. GHGs need to be contextualized as one very important metric for regenerative agriculture, but metrics such as farmer livelihood, healthy food, soil health, and clean water are also crucial.

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